The Trial of Lizzie Borden(46)
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Despite the overall defense success, the day still wore on the defendant: Lizzie seemed tired and “looked like a wilted flower.” She was not alone. It had been a momentous session inside and out of the courtroom: the ramshackle mill teams “frequently drowned the words of the witness, the birds sang merrily, the old cow gave her punctuating mooings with great deliberation, some stone cutters in an adjacent building chipped in, and a general condition of feverish restlessness dominated the place.” When court adjourned at 3:40 p.m., the chief justice cautioned the jury about its responsibilities. Wearing “an expression of paternal solicitude on his intelligently handsome face,” he warned the jurors against “allowing their minds to reach any conclusion with reference to the case,” adding, “you should not converse about the case until it is finally committed to you.” Howard had nothing but sympathy for the jurors, repeatedly lamenting their limited entertainment and enforced temperance. He described their “miserable” lot: “Up at 6 in the morning, breakfast at 7, tramp to the courthouse at 9, sit till 1, tramp through the broiling sun to dinner, back again followed by a gang of hoodlums, hammered till 5 by learned brothers, back to the hotel for supper, and immediately taken to their corridor, where they are locked in without means of amusement, instruction or recreation except their tongues.” And nothing to drink except “pure water filtered.”
SATURDAY, JUNE 10, 1893
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The courthouse was bounded by one of New Bedford’s busiest streets, and by the end of the first week Joe Howard was at the end of his patience with the noisy location: “The ingenuity of New Bedford’s authorities must have been taxed in their selection of a site for Bristol County’s court house, where the greatest possible annoyance in the line of extraneous sounding could be secured.” He did not object to the singing of birds or the mooing of the cow, but he complained about the “processional continuity of stone wagons, farmers’ carts, coal wagons, mill wagons, loaded with all kinds of material, stone cutters, whistling boys and vociferating crowds, whose combined outputs furnish a bedlamistic hurrahdom, vexatious to the ear and exasperating to the understanding.” On a happier note, he observed that the crowd outside the courthouse was enlivened by “a large number of young and rather pretty girls,” perhaps schoolgirls on their weekend break. Inside the courtroom, there were fewer women than usual. Those that came earned unflattering descriptions: “In bonnets, yellow was the predominant color and it held its own too, as far as complexions went.” It had been a long week; yet, according to the Fall River Daily Globe, Lizzie Borden “looks as she would look in church or in any public place where she in common with others, might be observed.” “If the strains of the past six days has told on her,” the paper continued, “she does not betray it so far as her physical appearance goes.”
Handleless or “hoodoo” hatchet, courtesy of Fall River Historical Society
After the prior day’s debacle for the prosecution, the defense was understandably in good humor. But the prosecution doggedly returned to the mystery of the handleless hatchet. As Julian Ralph commented, “The handleless hatchet, now generally known as ‘the hoodoo hatchet,’ continued its demonish pranks in the trial of Lizzie Borden for her life today. It chopped another great hole in the case.” Elizabeth Jordan theorized: “It was upon the three and a half-inch edge of this useful little household tool that the case for the commonwealth would split.”
Moody sent an officer to search for the missing piece of the handle. Lieutenant Francis Edson, seconded later by Officer Mahoney, testified that he went to the Borden house on Friday at 3:40 p.m. and was refused entrance. Charles J. Holmes, president of the Fall River 5 Cents Savings Bank and Lizzie’s éminence grise, had apparently been conducting his own fruitless search inside. During the original search, Edson, like the other officers, had been assigned areas to search: he was tasked with the areas in the cellar. He retrieved a small shingle hatchet and two wood axes from the cellar washroom as well as a claw-hammer hatchet from a shelf in the vegetable cellar. He delivered them to Marshal Hilliard on August 5. Robinson questioned him about the thoroughness of the search: “You were there to look, your business, was it not?” In addition to his search of the vegetable cellar, Edson looked in the water closet and saw nothing. But he had seen Officer Medley with the hatchet head, wrapped in paper.
William Medley offered a masculine counterpart to Adelaide Churchill. He was a bit of a chatterbox, delighted to have his moment to shine. Moody repeatedly interrupted him to remind him to stick to the facts and to answer the questions asked of him. Of his conversation with Lizzie in her room, Medley began, “The thought came to me.” Forestalling a soliloquy, the lawyer hastily replied, “Well, never mind.” At another point, Moody reminded his witness not to repeat conversations with other officers: “I don’t ask what was said.”
Medley’s testimony centered on his search of the barn and his discovery of the handleless hatchet in the cellar of the house. He described the barn loft as undisturbed and “very hot” before his search. Medley looked into the loft from the stairs, where, he said, he had seen no tracks or any sign that someone had been in the loft. But when he put his own hand down on the floor, the dust was so thick that his handprints left distinct impressions. In the cellar of the house, he found a small hatchet head in a box of odds and ends, sitting on a block about a foot and a half above the cellar floor. He noticed that the hatchet head was covered with a coarse substance that looked different than the fine dust he saw on the other items of “old rubbish” in the box. He showed the hatchet head to Captain Desmond and wrapped it up in brown paper to take to the city marshal. When Robinson asked him about the wrapping on cross examination, Medley admitted he was not “very tidy at such things.” Alluding to Harrington’s closely observed description of Lizzie’s dress, Robinson wryly observed, “Well, I am glad to find a man that is not on style.”